OrangeCon 2010

I’m trying something new which is to make a page to report on an event. It’s not much different from a blog posting, but now I’ll have a part of my site dedicated to events. I’ll probably cover anime and modeling conventions like Anime Expo and OrangeCon.

So here’s my report on OrangeCon, the annual event held by the Orange County Chapter of IPMS. Every year the event is held at Cal State Fullerton (except for one year when IPMS Nationals was held locally).

Every year a group of us Gundam modelers shows up with our mecha models and confounds the IPMS guys (or maybe it’s the other way around). IPMS Orange County has done a great job in recent years of trying to understand us. I went a few weeks ago to try to explain to them what goes on in our heads since there is a big difference in the way we think about our models.

Anyway, this year’s show was nice as usual. We had kind of a low turnout of Mecha models, with just me, Brandon (bhop), Angel and Nathan (Pascalior) showing up. Angel did bring three of Clem’s kits as well as one of Justin’s, a Zaku he built while studying in Japan, the lucky bastard.

Clem took First Place in one of the figure categories with “That Girl from Les Mis”:

Nathan took Third Place with his Kotobukiya Zoid kit:
This year our Build Gathering group sponsored the trophies in the Gundam category, you can see it on the trophies in the pics.

And I took Second Place with my HG 1/144 Enact:

It’s kinda funny that I took second place with my Enact, which is a really simple kit that I built almost completely OOB in just a few weeks. It beat out every other Gundam model there including the Ruby Guard GM that I spent about 9 months on and was purpose-built to be as perfect as possible and compete at IPMS. It also beat Clem’s two heavily-converted/modified GM Sniper and Gouf Custom kits as well as Angel’s Armada of MG kits. I nearly didn’t bring the Enact, it was really an afterthought when I realized that Clem had already taken my Sazabi the year before. The funny thing about the Enact is that as small and very very simple as it is, it’s pretty much flawless. Then again, the credit really goes to the Bandai engineers since that kit has only two seams to fix on the entire kit. It’s almost all just solid plastic pieces, all I did was paint it…

Well, it wouldn’t be an IPMS event if I didn’t walk away scratching my head.

The winner was a well-made Guyver. I didn’t mind losing to it, but I think maybe it could have been in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy figures/biological category. It’s a tough call since it looks like a robot but is a vinyl kit and has a much more organic feel than your typical mecha.